


Nothing Broken

by suncityblues



Series: Nothing Broken [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Murphamy - Freeform, No one has any chill in this series, spoilers until the very end of season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 18:26:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4532559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suncityblues/pseuds/suncityblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It occurs to him that his life on the Ark is about seeing what he can get away with until he gets floated. It feels like an unavoidable end.</p>
<p>Instead he gets put on the drop ship.” </p>
<p>This is mostly about Murphy but there is a bit of (past-ish) Murphamy in there somewhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Broken

**Author's Note:**

> If you feel like reading this on tumblr instead the link is [here. ](http://suncityblues.tumblr.com/post/126234299169/title-nothing-broken-characters-murphy-bellamy)

Murphy is thirteen years old when his mother chokes to death in her sleep.

After he finds her body he feels nothing at first, then relieved, then ashamed. He tries but he cannot make himself feel sad and this is the first time Murphy suspects there is something wrong with him.

Before she died he’d have daydreams about class never ending. In his mind, his teacher would notice something was wrong and say, “It’s alright Johnny, you can come live with me at school, and everything will be better from now on.” But his teachers never noticed, and even if they did he was hardly the only child on the Ark with problems.

In the absence Murphy spends as long as possible on his homework in the ship’s study room so he doesn’t have to go home.

After she dies though he dreams he chose to leave school early that day. He dreams he saves his mother right in the nick of time and that she’s so grateful that she quits drinking for good and starts loving him again.

(Some years later Clarke teaches him to turn people on their sides to prevent them from choking on blood or vomit and he keeps it in the back of his mind for the rest of his life).

He spends three months in an overcrowded dorm in the Child Protection Office with the other orphans before he’s finally released to the custody of his grandmother.

Murphy is fourteen by then and on his birthday he decides to not let people call him Johnny anymore. Most people call him by his last name now, anyways.

 

 

His grandmother is sickly and incontinent and needy but she loves him. She has trouble chewing and so he mashes her rations down to a greyish pulp for her to gum while she lectures him about the way things used to be, the mistakes his parents made, her childhood memories. He fails all of his exams except for English Literature and shows up at school only sporadically. His classes make him feel bored at best and dumb at worst so he chooses to pass the days helping his grandmother to the bathroom and dreaming about holding a pillow over her face until she stops breathing.

Murphy doesn’t kill his grandmother though, and she dies peacefully a couple of months after his fifteenth birthday. He keeps collecting her rations to trade for small luxuries until the smell gets so bad his neighbors complain to the guards. They arrest him for fraud and he spends his sixteenth birthday in Prison Station.

It is a relief not having nowhere to go and for the first time in a long while he makes friends and doesn’t feel bad about anything. He starts fights and they cheer him on, he gets angry and is not told he’s overreacting. He suspects that he is content. 

It occurs to him that his life on the Ark is just seeing what he can get away with until he gets floated. It feels like an unavoidable end.

Instead he gets put on the drop ship. 

 

 

On the ground Murphy has no idea what day it is most of the time. In the Grounder’s custody he cannot differentiate daytime from nighttime, his eyes are swollen so often he can barely force them open to let any light in.

He decides on one particularly bad day that he’s seventeen now because seventeen is a much more poetic age than sixteen to die at. Dying at sixteen is a tragedy, it’s My Brother Sam is Dead, it’s Alarbus from Titus Andronicus, it’s hearing about John Mbege falling from the trees. Dying at seventeen is, somehow, less distressing to him. He wonders what dying at Charlotte’s age would be like and he doesn’t know why but the thought makes him laugh out a huge wet sound. He laughs and laughs until a guard sticks the butt of a spear into his stomach to make him stop.

The air feels clearer afterwards so he considers letting himself be sixteen again.

 

 

On the stretcher heading towards the crashed Alpha Station Murphy reconciles himself before the idea of dying for the second time that day. He finds that despite everything he’d very much prefer to be alive, even after considering the not unpleasant benefits of eternal nothingness.

(Jaha tells him about faith some time later but it, like all religion, just sounds like a power grab to Murphy. He follows along anyway because Murphy is, above all else, a follower).

He is in pain almost always. Everything he touches hurts him where his fingernails used to be and it’s hard to keep from wincing at even the lightest movements. His mind cycles through worst case scenarios one after the other. He no longer has daydreams but thinks up contingency plans instead.

The closest he gets to having a fantasy is considering the off chance that he could run away and not be killed by his own people or the Grounders. It seems like an impossibility.

At the medical unit while he’s being poked and prodded by Clarke’s mother he catches the date on a screen behind her. He realizes he’s got weeks and weeks before he turns seventeen and when he’s released to the stockade he takes his teeth and makes vertical slits in the lining of his only jacket to represent each day until his birthday. Every morning that goes by he adds a horizontal cut to one of the slits and this, for him, is preferable to relying on someone else for information even after his jacket starts to fray and catch on things.

He won’t admit it out loud but the adults make him nervous and he can’t imagine being able to talk to one of them without being yelled at, even to just find out the time.

In the stockade he and Bellamy rotate between bickering and ignoring each other until at some point Bellamy gets fed up and asks, “What the hell are you always doing to your jacket?”

Murphy is not a particularly magnanimous person and he’s unwilling to share his rituals with someone else so he tells Bellamy to go fuck himself. He regrets it though because the silence that follows doesn’t sit well with him, he’s never been one to enjoy quiet time. He waits a moment until the air between them becomes too oppressive and then makes an obscene gesture with his hands. He says, “Hey while we’re in the mood for a pleasant chit chat, remember that time we--?” his hand movements are impeded by the ties around his wrists and the gesture he’s mimicking looks more like two spiders hitting each other than a sex act but Murphy is sure his point gets across.

Bellamy continues to ignore him, slightly redder in the face this time. 

 

 

Later Bellamy steadies himself against the square of Murphy’s back in the dark of the bunker as Finn is threatening the one eyed man. Murphy leans back slightly and isn’t sure what to make of the situation. He thinks he’s jealous of Bellamy for having power, respect, for having Octavia to always be there for him. He thinks he’s sick of being afraid all the time.

He also thinks he might be pining.

In the woods some time afterwards he makes the choice to tell Bellamy what the marks on his jacket mean. It’s mostly a thank you for getting him out of the stockade and though Bellamy doesn’t have much of a visible reaction, he does nod. As far as Murphy’s concerned, it is as close to putting the mutual attempts at hanging each other behind them as they’ll get. He knows Finn overhears them but he’s not worried, Finn’s always been nicer to him than most people.

(And he will remember Finn for that).

 

 

Murphy doesn’t think much about his small ritual again until he’s laying face down in a minefield with Jaha and his band of fools or pilgrims, Murphy’s not sure what to call them. The night is impossibly long and cold and he passes it by running his fingers over the holes in his jacket one by one. In a way it’s soothing to think about the days he’s been alive, the days he’s made it by the skin of his teeth and the possibility that he will continue to make it. But mostly it helps to have something to do that doesn’t involve being blown to pieces or thinking about anyone else being blown to pieces either. 

At some point during the night he realizes there’s only six days before he turns seventeen. The thought does not comfort him much.

 

The lighthouse, however, does comfort him. To a point. 

Murphy watches the video of the man and the gun over and over again until the death makes him feel a phantom pain in his stomach. The shot is inarticulate and clearly the man is not experienced with firearms. Murphy critiques the stranger’s style as the man slowly bleeds out over the course of what seems like ages. He begins to avoid that part of the lighthouse because he has no idea of how to turn the loop off, it plays automatically every time he walks by. He peeks around for the body but cannot find one. 

Murphy resolves to tell Jaha about it only if Jaha comes back for him. He also resolves that he will not go out of his way to help anyone anymore, the rest of the world be damned.

He knows this is an empty threat made to an empty room but it makes him feel better nonetheless. 

And so Murphy reads books. He watches compiled documentary series about animals that are most likely extinct by now. He takes long, hot showers and makes believe he’s a biker or an action movie star on one of the motorcycles stored about the place. He does his best to not think about being alone.

(His birthday comes and goes but he keeps marking the days anyway).

**Author's Note:**

> Hey thanks for reading! I noticed that Murphy makes a couple of book references in the series so if you're confused about why I made him a Shakespeare fan, that's it.
> 
> Edited: 9 August


End file.
